"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

August 31, 2016

What the hell was that? How can one campaign for more than a year on not only building a border wall but having Mexico pay for it — and then neglect half of the issue when one has a face-to-face meeting with Mexico's president? Is that the tactic of a brilliant negotiator?

All Trump had to say on the matter at his notecard conference this afternoon was that "We recognize and respect the right of either country to build a physical barrier or wall." Who doesn't recognize this? Of course we can build physical barriers on our territory. Indeed we already possess such barriers. The Trumpian heart of the issue has been that Mexico, however, will pay for the whole shebang next time around. And yet Trump doesn't even bring it up in his meeting with Peña Nieto?

Speaking of whom, I can see why the man has a presidential approval rating of 23 percent. Trump changed nothing in his U.S. domestic standing by meeting with Peña Nieto, but Peña Nieto probably just achieved an even lower approval rating at home. He offered a public-relations platform for the most hated man in Mexico, and nothing else: no nationally prideful pushback, no righteous criticism of Trump, no nothing. What a wimp.

***

Update: I just heard about this on "Hardball." So I looked it up and sure enough, with the aid of an online translator, there it is, President Peña Nieto's tweeted claim that he told Trump in their meeting that Mexico would not pay for the wall:

"At the beginning of the conversation with Donald Trump I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall."

So after the fact — after the news conference, that is — he's calling Trump a liar. This would have been more effectively delivered, well, at the news conference.

Nevertheless, the Clinton campaign is now delightfully calling Trump a choke artist. And adding this:

I must step out to have some "emergency" blood work done. I know that sounds silly, but it's true. This godawful thyroid medication I've been taking has for two months caused a daily, moist ball of fever. I have, accordingly, been advised to have blood drawn just as the fever hits — which it just now did. There could be an underlying infection, but I, in my vast medical knowledge, believe my fevers to be caused by my cure. We'll soon know. Actually, I'm praying for an infection, which is curable. For hypothyroidism, the only relief is daily medication forever, which means I'm probably stuck with wet shirts every morning for the rest of my life. Oh well, others have much bigger problems than that.

Dana Milbank has compiled the "decidedly B-list group of Trump supporters who argue his case on the airwaves" — decidedly and necessarily B-list, since "credentialed conservatives and elected Republicans generally won’t defend him."

There is no ranking or hierarchy of surrogate repulsiveness in Milbank's list, perhaps because "elevating" one of these clowns over another is as aesthetically difficult as deciding the superior merits of Milton's Beelzebub and Moloch. Nonetheless, I nominate the last named, Boris Epshteyn, as the most abysmal surrogate of all.

This demonic, lawyerly little man sharpened his venomous incisors as a "communications aide" to vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, which means he learned long ago how to never, never answer a question about whoever his benighted boss might currently be. He also sounds as though he has yet to either swallow or expectorate the last bite of his morning's grits.

You are welcome to nominate your own "most abysmal of all," of course. And you really can't go wrong. They're all "winners."

"Words cannot express…." That's the common refrain used to introduce expressive words of shock, anger, or remorse. The speaker or writer, it is flatly asserted, is too surprised, too furious, too despondent to articulate his or her emotion, whereupon the speaker or writer proceeds to erupt in volcanic prolixity. My shock at Trump's Mexico visit today was so profound, this morning I damn near used the common refrain myself, before proceeding, of course, to articulate at some length just how shockingly stupid his visit is.

Then, however, I gave the matter some thought — the antidote to emotional eruptions and extended rants. Is his visit shockingly stupid? Only to the extent that Trump is stupidly shocking, which is a characteristic of diminishing note. His official political debut some 14 months ago was grounded in the shock of unprecedented stupidity aimed at the electoral demimonde, which, turned out, is a much larger contingent than even Trump suspected (i.e., it's essentially the Republican base). In an attempt to sustain the high of mid-2015's shock, Trump has had to infuse ever greater doses of stupidity into the body politic's veins, with predictable results: most of us no longer get a kick from his cocaine; the man is perpetually horrifying, true enough, but somehow a bore as well.

This morning the least bored person on earth, I'd wager, is Trump's most recent campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway. She's a political professional who has made rather gallant attempts at professionalizing Trump's "campaign." I'd further wager that today she's muttering, over and over, "Words cannot express my shock, anger, and remorse at the dumbest political stunt since Michael Dukakis donned a helmet."

With this Mexico-visit thing, her immediate superior, former Breitbarter Steve Bannon, made his move. Just yesterday I was wondering where Steve had been keeping himself. Trump hasn't really been Trump lately. He's been under the obvious spell of the controlling Kellyanne, whose influence probably accounts for whatever narrowing has occurred in the polls. Mr. Bannon wasn't about to take creeping success lying down. Reports the Washington Post:

Trump’s newly installed campaign chief executive, Stephen K. Bannon, played a key role in devising the Wednesday stop…. [He] made the case … that Trump must underscore his populist immigration views in the final weeks of the general-election campaign, perhaps with an audacious gesture. [Mexico President] Peña Nieto’s invitation was brought up, and Bannon said it offered Trump an opening to make headlines and showcase himself as a statesman who could deal directly with Mexico. Trump was intrigued by Bannon’s proposal and agreed, but not all aides and allies were as enthusiastic.

In embracing Bannon's proposal a prodigious mistake has been made, but no unenthusiastic names were named by the Post. I should think that above all others, Kellyanne Conway is positively apoplectic. Weeks of her modifying influence were squandered, just like that, for campaign CEO Bannon finally made his Breitbartian move. Which, true to form, was incredibly stupid. Of course Kellyanne will for some time be all smiles about this, for she is a professional propagandist. The outskirts of Baghdad are secure, and Stalingrad is about to be taken in toto.

The full, blithering stupidity of Bannon's advised stunt remains to unfold. There is no upside. Mexico's president will tell Trump that his beautiful wall is a mirage, which the Republican nominee can put where the Rio Grande don't flow. Trump will then give a dully delivered, gibberish-imbued, teleprompted speech to millions, which will further alienate most of them, for voter alienation is Bannon's specialty.

Meanwhile, Ms. Conway will be muttering to all the staffers within earshot, "Words cannot express…." For me, least shocking of all would be, eventually, her enthusiastic departure from this horror of a resurrected amateurish campaign.

August 30, 2016

At this point, Clinton is more likely to approach the size of Obama’s wins, whether his 365-to-173 electoral vote win over John McCain in 2008 or his more narrow 332-to-206 victory over Mitt Romney four years later. A 1980-style blowout does not seem to be in the cards, given the country’s current political divide or the two major-party nominees.

That's what the smart, safe money says. I prefer netless, high-wire anxiety, so I'm still betting on the long shot of a 400-something Clinton victory, which the upcoming debates could well render feasible. It's not so much that Hillary might perform with perfection as that Trump is likely to blunder his way onto the stage — and not stop blundering.

James Fallows is correct that Trump's professed non-preparation for the debates is "brilliant if it masks actual preparation on Trump’s side," but it's "stupid in all other circumstances." Just what are the odds that Trump will take the singularly "brilliant" route? Pretty damn long, I'd say, which shortens the other odds.

Only 70 days out, why on God's chlorofluorocarbonated Earth is NBC News polling these people?

Clinton now enjoys 48 percent support, while Trump holds steady with 42 percent. Last week, Clinton led Trump by 8 points. The latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll was conducted online from August 22 through August 28 among registered voters.

That tells us exactly what? That Hillary is, possibly, slipping among millions of people unlikely to vote?

Donald Trump, asked about San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal on Saturday to stand during a performance of the national anthem [as a protest of minority oppression], says maybe Kaepernick "should find a country that works better for him."

Trump's advice is merely a variation of the old right-wing shibboleth of "America, love it or leave it," whose selective deployment has always fascinated me.

One is more likely to hear this trope when a Republican is in the White House; otherwise, under a Democratic president, America, for right wingers, becomes a bottomless hellhole worthy of the speediest abandonment. All is lost in this second of cases, and one might as well relocate to a comparative paradise such as Yeltsin's or Putin's Russia. Under Democratic administrations the far right repeatedly demeans, belittles, demonizes, trashes, and in general protests these United States.

This, in appropriate circles, is known as patriotism. Well then, are Kaepernick's seething protests not equally patriotic?

Even more intriguing is that Trump is the guy who keeps telling Kaepernick & Clan just what a bottomless hellhole their country is; indeed, it's a bottomless hellhole for every American. And since even Trump knows that we'll have no Republican president to recreate a lovable country in 2017, I find I must interpret his advice as friendly — not mean-spirited, as was the old shibboleth.

Only in America's increasingly anti-intellectual hothouse could the second half of these presidential debate-prep musings, from Trump's Art of the Deal's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, be credible:

Trump has severe attention problems and simply cannot take in complex information — he will be unable to practice for these debates. Trump will bring nothing but his bluster to the debates. He’ll use sixth-grade language, he will repeat himself many times, he won’t complete sentences, and he won’t say anything of substance.

Even so, Clinton has to be careful — she could get everything right and still potentially lose the debates if she comes off as too condescending, too much of a know-it-all.

I submit that for Clinton it will be as humanly impossible to be non-condescending to a substanceless, swaggering dolt like Trump as it was for Al Gore to treat George W. Bush as a political equal. However theatrically ill advised Al's sighing was, it was also irresistible. Here was a sitting vice president who knew every policy rope in depth, while at the other podium lounged a bumper sticker. Mr. Gore entered those 2000 debates in the genuine but mistaken belief that the American electorate was fond of knowledge and experience; fonder of these, anyway, than of shallow bundles of Rovian-crafted platitudes. Only a true, calculating automaton could have stood there and resisted serial sighing at W.'s vast opaqueness.

And therein lies the contemporary irony of Clinton's reputed insincerity. A plausible argument can be made that in fact Hillary suffers from an excess of genuine expression, and that this will brim over in the debates. Is it humanly, or I should ask, genuinely, possible to be "too condescending" to a bullying charlatan like Trump? I think not. Thus Clinton is likely to find condescension irresistible. A calculating automaton could pull off an act of non-condescension, but anyone genuinely inspirited by a fondness for knowledge and experience is bound to sigh — or "crack wise," as my theatrical hero, Bogey, would have said.

I think back to early February of this year, when, at a town hall meeting, CNN's Anderson Cooper was drilling Hillary about her Goldman Sachs largess. "Did you have to be paid $675,000?" he asked. Answered Hillary: "I don't know, that's what they offered." Now I happened to think her answer was funny as hell, mostly because the best comedy lines are grounded not in farce, but realism. How many speakers negotiate a proffered fee downward? Hillary took a lot of flak for that answer. But please note that the flak came in reaction to the answer's genuineness, not disingenuity.

One could argue as well that the same, fundamental human honesty is at work in what Eugene Robinson sees, this morning, as admonishable. "There is still a defensiveness in her explanations" of her email predicament, he writes, "that makes me wonder if her contrition is more situational than genuine. I’m sorry this caused me such grief isn’t the same as I’m sorry I did it." To which I would answer but Hillary can't: Duh. Of course her contrition is situational — and nothing could be more humanly genuine. As any spouse-besieged husband knows, the quickest and most genuine route to redemption is to fake contrition for any situational transgression he doesn't quite comprehend. Throttling up true remorse for a mysterious sin lies beyond the emotionally possible. And so Hillary, too, is left with that most genuine reaction to the outsized email kerfuffle: Good grief.

What Hillary's critics seem to want from her is a kind of political method-acting. She is to crawl into the disembodied soul of St. Mary the Blessed Virgin and decry all insufficient auras of humility. But she's too human, too genuine, for that. Most often, she just plays herself. And this, no doubt, will get her into debate trouble. For her irrepressible knowledge and experience will just as doubtless be vilified by the increasingly anti-intellectual crowd as sighing manifestations of condescension. Which they will be.

August 29, 2016

Huma Abedin on Monday announced that she is separating from her husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.).

"After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband"….

Abedin's statement comes after a report Sunday said that her husband had apparently sent a woman a photo of his crotch with his toddler son in the background.

I feel nothing but sorrow for both of them. She has suffered — publicly — a difficult marriage and he is quite obviously disturbed. His behavior transcends your garden-variety, husbandly hanky-panky. It's clinical.

***

Pathetic though it may be, one does what one can with whatever one has.

I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information.

I missed it, but ThinkProgress relates that the AP's executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, appeared on CNN's "Reliable Sources" yesterday. She conceded the tweet lacked "precision" and was "sloppy," but added it nevertheless "included a link to the story itself" (which itself, from Carroll's lips, was a careless, abhorrent inaccuracy). The story, too, was inaccurate, distorted, and unfair.

And yet in news value the bogus story (assisted by its tweet) nearly equaled, last week, the mainstream heft of Trump's mysteriously undulating immigration "policy."

Next up, no doubt? An AP investigation into why so many Americans distrust Hillary Clinton.

The undecideds are miserably torn. What to do, what to do, in the face of such delicately balanced prospects.

On the one hand,

Simple as that.

On the other hand, the man behind this ad is, as David Plouffe correctly noted yesterday, a "psychopath" — a demagogue teeming with the "grandiose notion of self-worth, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse."

OK so a bit of fallout, such as the casual use of tactical nuclear weapons (why else do we have them?), could come with Trump's election. But surely the undecideds are intent on higher and more immediate concerns. As the psychopath is restoring America to its traditional place of world greatness (which, amidst the global rubble, should be easy), can he make our trains run on time? That's the test of a true strongman, and yet, not a word about a "deployment force" in his ad.

What was once a central part of the historical profession, a vital part of this country’s continuing democratic discussion, is disappearing….

Knowledge of our political past is important because it can serve as an antidote to the misuse of history by our leaders and save us from being bamboozled by analogies, by the easy "lessons of the past." It can make us less egocentric by showing us how other politicians and governments in other times have responded to division and challenge. And it can help us better understand the likely effects of our actions, a vital step in the acquisition of insight and maturity.

Judging by the state of our political discourse during this dismal campaign season, the change [i.e., the reappearance of academic political history] can’t come soon enough.

Thus write Professors Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, in a NY Times op-ed, on the "cratering" of "American political history as a field of study" in our universities. Blown open with sudden force in the 1960s and the aftershocks of the 1970s and beyond, the crater is now vast, deep, middle-aged, and inexcusable.

"In many graduate programs one can earn a doctorate in American history with little exposure to politics," observe Logevall and Osgood. Indeed, freshly molded PhDs in American history are apt to sound more like California psychotherapists, cultural anthropologists, or jargon-laden scribblers of sentimental mush. Ask them about the Northern Securities case and its implications for executive power and, after a brief pause of unfamiliarity and incomprehension, you'll get an extended survey of the profound historical importance of lesbian Guatemalan immigrants as key players in America's past of relentless oppression and, ultimately, underclass triumphalism. There will, however, be little emphasis on actual class analysis — too Marxist, too old school, too already done. America's history, you'll be told, is constituted by conflicts of gender and race.

As the good professors note, this "cultural turn" from political history was inaugurated in the 1960s by the "long overdue diversification of the academy.... As a field once dominated by middle-class white males opened its doors to women, minorities and people from working-class backgrounds, recovering the lost experiences of these groups understandably became priority No. 1." No political historian I know of resents either said diversification or its priorities of gender and race, however those priorities rapidly became exclusive. Powerful dead white males — the stuff of traditional political history — were out, for powerful dead white males always seemed to win. This was too psychologically damaging. Initially the cultural-studies types dwelled on the assorted oppressions inflicted by The Man, which offered the relief of collective commiseration. But this, too, proved too psychologically damaging. They realized that the historiographical approach of endless oppression and implied white-male triumphalism only underscored the helplessness of their subjects, which should no longer be conceded or observed. They wanted their own triumphalism. Hence through predetermined theses aided by selective research the culturalists soon "discovered" that American women and American minorities were imbued with far more power than we ever knew. And so the research has proceeded.

This quasi-historiographical, cultural-studies phenomenon will pass, just as Progressive historians' focus on class conflict passed and the "consensus school" (of Hofstadter et al.) passed and the "presidential synthesis" (the teaching of American history through presidential tenures) passed. And, as the op-eders note, this next passing — which neither will be nor should be complete — "can't come soon enough." Had the American electorate been armed with merely rudimentary political historical knowledge, Reaganism's one-dimensional government-is-the-problem and Gingrichism's malevolent linguistic distortions and Tea Partyism's idiotic "constitutional conservatism" and Trumpism's pronounced cryptofascism would have been seen all along for what they were, are. In fact, we would have never descended to Trumpism, for an awareness of political history and the wretched demagoguery that so often comes with it would have stopped movement conservatism in its hideous tracks — and Gov. Palin would still be handing out socialist oil dividends to grateful Alaskans.

"Knowledge of our political past is important because it can serve as an antidote to the misuse of history by our leaders and save us from being bamboozled"; it can reintroduce "insight and maturity." Well said, Profs. Logevall and Osgood.

August 28, 2016

This morning Maureen Dowd poses a practical problem, which morphs into the almost metaphysically perplexing.

First, and for what at first seems like the duration of her column, she devotes herself to the theme of Hillary Clinton's very best ally — that being, of course, her worst enemy: "In this insane campaign year, Hillary doesn’t even need an oppo-research team digging up nasty stuff about her opponent’s record. She just has to stand there and wait for Trump to open his mouth."

Then comes a thematic transition: "If Hillary had a normal opponent, her vulnerabilities would be more glaring." Continues Dowd:

Extremists always ride to Hillary’s rescue. Just as Ken Starr and impeachment-crazed conservatives in the House pushed it way too far and made laughingstocks of themselves, succumbing to Clinton Derangement Syndrome, so the alt-right allows Hillary to have an easy target that occludes the Clintons’ own transgressions.

Parenthetically, transgression is a difficult word to define with any precision. Jaywalking is a transgression, as is premeditated murder. Watergate and Iran-Contra were transgressions, as are conflicts of interest. In the latter instance — i.e., all things Foundational — Hillary's are unproven, and are therefore mere allegations. And yet "transgression" can still be thrown around with political and journalistic impunity, precisely because "transgression" is so imprecise. As for Hillary's email "scandal" (another term of dealer's-choice ambiguity), the nominee has repeatedly copped to a transgression, and yet, again with impunity, hostile politicos and impenetrable journalists persist in demanding that she — cop to a transgression.

So let us move on, on to Dowd's final thematic twist. Because her opponents — Trump and the so-called alt-right — are such copy-worthy boobs,

Hillary is more easily able to continue to cold-shoulder the press on serious issues, which really is an outrage and will hurt her in the end, because she’s building up a giant bubble of hostility that will follow her into the White House....

Many people believe that Trump is so demented and dangerous that any criticism of Hillary should be tabled or suppressed, that her malfeasance is so small compared to his that it is not worth mentioning. But that’s not good for her or us to leave so many things hanging out there, without her ever having to explain herself.

Letting her rise above everything for the good of the country is not good for the country.

Some of Dowd and Friends' disgruntlement I've already addressed. What we have here is a double paradox. The more Hillary "explains herself," the more the mainstream muckrakers of virtue demand that she explain herself; and the more Hillary submits to chronically unsatisfied journalistic questioning, the less likely she is to submit to such questioning.

Loopy paradoxes aside, Dowd's primal disgruntlement is endowed with some validity. Is it proper that "many people" (I among them) should believe that any criticism of Hillary should wait, since her opponent is a dangerous, demented demagogue who, as president, would reduce the world's greatest economic and military power to a banana republic of unprecedented domestic ruin and rank foreign-affairs cluelessness?

Let us speak again of impreciseness. For even though the answer is a wholesome no, the question also answers itself, in the wholesale affirmative. The danger here is not self-censorship but one, potentially, of perspective lost. Hillary's conceded transgressions are indeed "small," and inflating them to blockbuster immensities (out of some vague sense of opinion-journalism self-virtue) in the presence of a demented, nation-destroying demagogue would be catering not only to political imprudence but intellectual evil. The danger, however increasingly small itself, is Donald Trump and Trumpism — and in the forefront they should remain, until the danger is decisively crushed. Nitpicking — and that's what it is, not authentic criticism — about scarcely a handful of obscurely "c-marked" emails and altogether unsubstantiated conflicts of interest only attenuates the eminent priority of crushing the hell out of Trump and Trumpism.

Nonetheless, I'll cop to a certain reluctance about self-censorship. That's never a good practice — except when it is; except, that is, when it's grounded in pragmatic principles. And for the next 72 days — and there it ends — there is no higher principle of pragmatism than thrashing, exclusively, the unholy bejesus out of Donald Trump.

August 27, 2016

How fitting that it's two Richard Nixon advisers who have penned, for the Washington Post, a dark, morbid, brooding advisory memo to the GOP. The paper's headline writer slapped this on it: "Memo to GOP: Forget 2016. Start thinking 2018 and 2020." With modesty intact, I'd argue that my headline is immensely more apposite.

Richard Allen and Tom Korologes (both, deputy assistants in Nixon's White House) propose, to their party, "a four-point plan for moving forward." Since time tends to move forward, it's difficult to imagine that Allen and Korologes could have been more stylistically redundant. This is what often happens to the brain when one spends the height of one's professional career writing memoranda to presidents. Still — and here's the kicker — in contradiction to their redundancy, the advisers' four-point plan points every which way but forward. It's not even a four-point plan; it is, rather a three-point manual for crushing stagnation and a one-fingered attitude thrusted at the American electorate.

The first point of Allen and Korologes' "plan" is merely an acknowledgement of the obvious: that Hillary Clinton is going to win the White House. Indeed, "It appears a political landslide will sweep the country," they observe. The authors, however, are far from disconsolate about this. "The larger [her] margin," they add, "the greater the chances a Clinton administration will overplay its hand, handing Republicans a clear opportunity to repair the damage in 2018 and 2020." That, you will observe, is not a plan but a Clintoncentric bet; one that I'd bet against. (On the other hand, if the Clinton administration so much as honors the Chinese New Year on 28 January 2017 or "Kansas Day" on the 29th, congressional Republicans will bellow that the young administration is overplaying its hand, and declare that all-out countermeasures are called for.)

As for the authors' three-point plan, it entails "clean[ing] house at the Republican National Committee and chang[ing] the primary rules that allowed Trump to win the nomination." That second objective could be tricky, since the sprawling apparatuses of the state parties set the primary rules. Reince Priebus' sacking would seem to be a given, though, since somebody must take the fall. As rewarding as that might be, this other "option" is even more so: The GOP must "creat[e] superdelegates," urge the authors. Enough of this populism shit. Is it any wonder that mobs lead to mobocracy?

At last we come to Allen and Korologes' politically meatier two-point plan — the essence of crushing stagnation and the middle finger. One:

There will be more than 2,000 presidential appointees, many requiring Senate confirmation — the entire Cabinet and sub-Cabinet, agency heads and commissions. Republicans should pick and choose carefully the most egregious liberals [that would be all of them] and expose their views. Pending Supreme Court nominees still require 60 votes for cloture, and although the pressure to confirm nominees will be heavy, it is not unheard of to vote against justices (think about Robert Bork) or to postpone confirmation hearings indefinitely.

Two:

With a Republican House, attention-getting hearings can be held every week on the inevitable missteps in a Clinton administration. The domestic scene, from the economy to health care to trade to infrastructure, will quickly ripen for congressional oversight. Meanwhile, Republicans can shift focus to the midterms.

In short, gut the administration before its born; normalize the Senate's grotesque refusal to permit the president the execution of her constitutionally mandated duty of filling Supreme Court vacancies; flood the House with a torrent of Whitewaterlike investigations masquerading as policy oversight as well as overt Whitewaterlike investigations; and otherwise practice nothing but politics, politics, politics. Allen and Korologes propose no policies, no alternative visions, no anything of any actual governance; they suggest nothing — nothing at all — about moving the nation forward.

This could backfire. I can't say how soon President Clinton would come out swinging. But I can say, through the power of empirical observation, that her character is void of easy intimidation. She will not sit in the Oval Office playing solitaire and doing little else but responding to subpoenas as a bunch of middle-aged white male reactionary goons attempt to boss her around. She would counterpunch soon enough, reminding those landsliding voters who "swept" her into office that the GOP is answering with: Fuck you, fuck you all; as far as we're concerned, what you really voted for was yet another four years of crushing stagnation.

In that event Republicans won't be the only ones shifting focus to the midterms. And that's when things could get interesting. Can the Clinton machine put an end to off-year Democratic sloth? That, though not soon enough, we'll likely find out.

Likely, not certainly. There's always the chance that some significant portion of congressional Republicans will ignore Allen, Korologes & Co., and instead decide to help govern. The party's 2016 thumping could be that severe. This prospect avails even more interest, for it would signal the formal fracturing of the Grand Old Party. The internal strain would be too much to bear. Either the reddest, tea-partying fringe would splinter off, or the fringe would devour the party whole, leaving the moderates only a third-party option.

August 26, 2016

Republicans on the Hill said that much of what Clinton has proposed during her campaign amounts to unfinished agenda items of the Obama administration — and they don’t expect her to have any more luck than he did while facing an obstructionist Republican Congress.

Some Republicans warned that Clinton will have less…. "There is a long history of Republicans opposing pretty much everything Hillary Clinton has done, from trying to reform healthcare in the 1990s to what she was doing as secretary of state — there’s a long memory there," said [Dan Holler of Heritage Action for America]. "Assuming she wins, Republicans could in some world say the message here is that we have to compromise with Hillary Clinton. I’d be very surprised if that was their takeaway."

I'd be just as surprised if Democrats don't make Republican obstructionism the centerpiece of their 2017-18 midterm strategy. Regrettably, though, even the best of strategies often don't get out the Democratic vote in midterms. It's the party's worst failing — and a difficult one to cure, since the absence of motivation underlying it is so damn bewildering.

I'm just glad that D.J. Trump and the entire Republican wombat machine have provided us this sublime opportunity, at this critical juncture in world history, to focus on the issues.

***

Speaking of comment sections, I wish to add a note about a "block" I imposed in mine yesterday. It's the only one in existence here, and I resisted imposing it for weeks. I believe in free debate and I'm fond of vigorous disagreement. But when one's debating technique and profound disagreements are centered in seeing Jews (or any other ethnic group) everywhere, behind every wicked policy, then that commenter blocks himself from our sober consideration. I, too, don't much care for our policy toward Israel and I believe Bibi Netanyahu is a shameless demagogue and I positively detest Israel's treatment of the Palestinians (just as many Israelis detest their nation's treatment of the Palestinians). But I would suspect — or I hope I would suspect — some deep corruption of my intellectual soul were I to commence seething against "the Jews" as some sort of monolithic ethnic body, as a certain commenter so recently, and persistently, did here. And with his personal corruption came a contamination of this comment section, which I could no longer abide. So he's gone. For his wasn't debate, discussion, or disagreement; it was merely blind bigotry. And I won't have it.

This morning, while reading Eugene Robinson and David Brooks in tandem, it struck me with uncommon intensity just how flatly two-dimensional this charade of a presidential contest has become, in print anyway.

Liberal commentators are aghast at the "conservative" candidate, and they — we, you and I — cannot help but repeat and repeat again the bloody conspicuousness of his ghastliness. It's all we have. Conservative commentators, on the other hand, tend to affected sorrow. They're even more aghast at the Republican nominee, since they and their party are the ones stuck with him; but about that, the less said the better. And so they dwell in tender pity, sighing that the Democratic nominee isn't a saint. It's all they have.

I give you Mr. Robinson, who attempts a subtle seduction:

I realize that most of Trump’s ardent fans do not take kindly to being lectured by the likes of me. But it is with a certain degree of genuine sympathy that I say what has to be said: Your candidate is a flake. A fraud. A bag of air. A con man. A joke.

One can hit the thesaurus for variations on this theme, but they'll all mean the same: Donald Trump is a ghastly human being, and even ghastlier nominee. Next week, two more Robinson commentaries saying the same thing; 20 or so here. It's all we have.

Turning to Brooks and his Bill Bennettlike columns of virtues, we find much sadness — sadness that Hillary Clinton is insufficiently "gracious." But Brooks, fighting despair, is there to help, to exhort, to guide.

The gracious people one sees in life and reads about in history books — I’m thinking of the all-time greats like Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela and Dorothy Day as well as closer figures ranging from Francis to Havel — turn awareness of their own frailty into sympathy for others' frailty.

I should like to remind Brooks that Abraham Lincoln, attorney for powerful corporate interests and relentlessly ambitious politician, didn't trust his fellow citizens. He postponed and then mitigated emancipation in the certain knowledge that most white voting Northerners were racist boobs who gave not a fig about the enslaved. Losing more sons and brothers to "prematurely" ending the plight of the racially disdained could be, well, rather impolitic.

I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main…. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained…. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

And there we have it. Even most reputed saints are less than saintly (excluding Mandela, Day, Francis of Assisi and Buddy Rich), and, above all, among their ranks one will never find a politician. The fulfillment of political objectives too consistently requires at least a touch of the tawdry. For Brooks, this entails Mrs. Clinton's inadequate graciousness. Maybe so, maybe not. And yet Hillary's objective is the peaceful ending of de facto Republican rule — not sainthood. One may have an aesthetic distaste for her, but anyone of conscience cannot argue with her fundamental aim. And compared with that other leading political figure of our time, how clean a smell she has!

Conceding that, though, would, for Brooks, violate the protocol of partisanship. The poor thing must dwell in pity. As for the rest of us — it's back to ghastliness.

August 25, 2016

Doctor's appointment. You know the routine. The appointment will entail a 30-minute lecture on everything I'm supposed to be doing, followed by several months of my not doing any of it, since my vices are already down to a near-intolerable minimum.